Hereafter, all the 47,600 companies so far registered with the Registrar of Companies (ROC), Andhra Pradesh, will have to file their returns online. The ministry of company affairs (MCA) is launching the MCA21 Project here on Thursday, which will provide all ROC services on the internet.
The scanning of the documents of the remaining 18,600 inactive companies is in progress. “This office will become almost paperless in future,” state ROC, N S Ponnunambi, said.
The MCA has selected TCS as the implementation partner for the Rs 358-crore e-governance project which will cover all the services provided by the ROCs including registration of companies, receipt of the statutory returns filed by the companies and issue of copies of the records needed by them.
So far, the project has been implemented in Delhi, Coimbatore, Pondicherry and Kerala. After Andhra Pradesh, the project is set to be launched in Karnataka.
MCA serves over 7 lakh companies in India through its 35 field offices located mainly in the State capitals. The project will provide for anytime anywhere electronic services with speed and certainty to all the stakeholders.
The focus of the project is on bringing about a fine balance between trade facilitation on one hand and effective enforcement of the corporate laws on the other.
Following the implementation of the project, anyone who wants to inspect the documents of any company can do so online by paying a fee of Rs 50. The fee can be paid through internet banking, credit card or a challan.
In Andhra Pradesh, the fee can be paid in any of the 200 authorised branches of the Punjab National Bank, Indian Bank, ICICI Bank and the State Bank of India.
Deputy ROC of Andhra Pradesh, Vijay Bhaskar, told Business Standard that following payment of the fee, ROC would provide three hours of continuous access for online inspection of documents. This inspection should be done within seven days from the date of payment of the fee.
Stating that there would be no facility for physical filing of the returns by companies from Thursday, he said that those companies, which were unable to file their returns online could approach the facilitation centre at Ameerpet in Hyderabad. The centre would be operated by TCS.
TCS has implemented the e-governance project in Andhra Pradesh over a period of eight months. Meanwhile, the ROC here has registered all the documents pending in the office since 1978.
With regard to the large number of registered companies that have been inactive for a long time, Vijay Bhaskar said that so far 3,000 companies in the state had utilised the Section 560 of the Companies Act to de-register their names. The section provides for de-registration of companies subject to certain conditions and procedure.
Autor: Ch Prashanth Reddy
Quelle: Business Standard, 20.04.2006
